The 17th annual Midwest Conference on Literature, Language, and Media (MCLLM)will be held March 20-21, 2009 at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb,Illinois.

Since 9/11, there has been a call for authors to legitimately represent theattack on New York City. Several texts, including but not limited toWilliam Gibsonâ€™s Pattern Recognition (2003) and Jess Walterâ€™s The Zero(2006), utilize the 9/11 attacks as a psychological framework within genrefiction to highlight the (in)stabilization, negotiation, and fragmentationof individuals in society, while Don DeLilloâ€™s Falling Man (2007) offers amore literary attempt at directly representing 9/11.

This panel asks not just whether genre novelists such as Gibson, Walter,and others, deserve a wider consideration from academia given their themesof representation, but also asks for a sustained analysis of what thesegenre and otherwise marginalized authors are doing with 9/11 that isdifferent from the representations of 9/11 commonly found in â€œliteraryâ€works by those like DeLilloâ€™s novel. In short, this panel asks for essaysthat consider what forms of counter-narratives specific to 9/11 are offeredby authors commonly lumped into genre fiction, while also asking for essaysthat assess literary texts such as DeLilloâ€™s Falling Man.